The World's Best Distraction(s)

I'm thinking about featuring more distractions here for a few reasons--because I'm fully aware my heat-seeking missives about why we should all start learning Eastern languages and naming our kids Murgesh, Hu Wei, or Abdullah can be a mite troubling (or as Phil once commented, "Jesus, why the [expletive deleted] did I read this before going to bed??," possibly the highest compliment any post of mine has ever received), because the internet ate my attention-look a dog blog!-attention span, and because the internet is also like a Memory Cloud where we can all wallow in luxury and steal cool time-destroying tools from everywhere and use them as a new shiny-object-oriented form of communication--and Squirmelicious was a timely enabler. He must be a tech minion like myself, one whose path to enlightened nirvana was hastened along by an iPhone. And now, amongst other neat things in its 3G version, you can hold your iPhone like a 6-iron and play the Back 9 on a virtual, dirt-cheap Pebble Beach:

Things are rough out there, with stock markets crashing, banks imploding, and politicians arguing about lipsticks and pigs and 60’s radicals. It’s time for a break. And what better distraction is there than the awesome iPhone?

The iPhone 3G, the most recent iteration of the revolutionary device, has seen its previously closed system opened to 3rd party developers. The change enabled users to download apps from Apple’s app store and load them onto the phone. Where the original iPhone offered only a handful of applications– Google Maps, You Tube, a weather forecaster, and one or two other programs– the app choices on the 3G are in the thousands.

A perusal of the App store will display both several categories of programs and multiple takes on the same program. For example, there are at least twelve different programs to track your golf score, six programs that access the social network site Digg!, seven incarnations of Sudoku, twenty-two personal information managers, and the list goes on.

With memory precious and many of the programs costing between $.99 and $10.00, how is one to know which programs to choose? Squirmelicious has solved this problem for you by choosing the 12 best Applications for the iPhone.

There are a lot of great ones, but here are the 12 best in no particular order:

1. Facebook - Addiction to the world’s most popular social network is widespread and adding this wonderful client to your iPhone will only exacerbate the problem, but how else are you going to announce to the world that you are waiting at a red light?


2. AIM - You can finally chat on your iPhone with this client that offers all the same chat capabilities as Apple’s ichat.


3. Pandora – This phenomenal program will literally change the way you listen to music. Pandora, along with Last/FM allow you to create your own custom radio stations as well as access the stations created by those in your network. You might want to grab this one fast as it’s not clear how much longer they will be around.


4. Yelp – I use this one constantly. Yelp offers user submitted reviews of restaurants, bars, and retail outlets and by utilizing the iphones built in GPS system, the reviews are for places right where you are at the moment.


5. Flipbook – this polished program lets you create frame-by-frame animations. Pointless, but oh so fun.


6. Labyrinth – using the devices accelerometer, this game allows you to roll balls through a maze avoiding holes and other obstacles by tilting your phone in various directions.


7. Net News Wire – This rss reader uses your news gator account. Simple and effective.


8. Missile Command – My favorite game from junior high school now on the iPhone.


9. Traffic - Real time traffic reports utilizing the iPhone’s built in GPS chip.


10. My Delicious – Access your delicious bookmarks right from your iPhone.


11. AirMe – Share Geo-Tagged photos with many different photo sites from flickr to picassa.


12. Remote – Control iTunes from your iPhone.